Roadmap
Where TrustBnB is going. Dates aren't promised; the order is.
Now
TrustBnB 0.3.0 is free and runs entirely in your browser:
- Scores on search results and listing pages, on every Airbnb country site.
- City-by-city comparison for 44 cities, with a monthly check for newer data.
- A popup status light, display options and a "check a rating" box.
Next
- Store listings. Publish on the Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-ons and Edge Add-ons, so installing and updating no longer goes through zip files. Steps are in Releasing.
- Website. The product site and these docs, deployed on Vercel.
Later: TrustBnB Pro
A paid plan, sold through Dodo Payments. This is the plan, not a commitment: nothing below is built yet. How payments stay safe is in Payments, safely.
Plans
TrustBnB is a small tool that costs almost nothing to run, so Pro is priced to be an easy yes. Same number in euros (VAT included) and US dollars.
| Plan | Price | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Yearly | €9.99 / $9.99 | Renews every year. Cancel anytime. |
| Lifetime | €19.99 / $19.99 | Paid once. Pro for as long as TrustBnB Pro exists. |
Lifetime is two years of Yearly. After VAT and payment fees, TrustBnB keeps about €7.40 of a Yearly sale in Europe and about €15.20 of a Lifetime one. No monthly plan or trip pass: at €9.99 a year, they'd only add choices.
Two scores
| Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | One flat scale for every listing, built from how Airbnb rates overall | Each listing compared with its own city |
| Data | Built into the extension, updated with each release | Refreshed as soon as new data is available, more cities over time |
| Explanation | The score and its tier | Why it got that score (see below) |
| Account | None | None: a license key pasted into the popup |
| Privacy | Nothing leaves the browser | License check and data download only; never the pages you visit |
"Why this score" would show, for each listing:
- how much its own reviews count against the city average (step 1 of the score),
- its rank in the city ("beats 78% of 61,000 listings in Paris"),
- how it compares with the city's typical rating,
- its sub-ratings (cleanliness, accuracy, check-in, communication, location, value) ranked against the city, since Inside Airbnb's data has them too,
- the date of the data it's based on.
Today everyone gets the Pro-style city comparison for free. The switch to a flat scale for the free plan would ship in one announced release, not quietly.
How it would work
- Checkout, from the extension. The popup gets a Pro tab with a "Get Pro" button that opens Dodo's hosted checkout in a new tab, for a Dodo Payments product with license keys turned on. Dodo is the merchant of record: it handles VAT and sales tax, receipts, refunds and chargebacks.
- License key. After payment, Pro turns on in the extension automatically; the key also
arrives by email for other browsers, where it can be pasted into the Pro tab. The
extension calls Dodo's public license endpoints directly:
activateonce, thenvalidateonce a day, with a few days' grace when offline. Nothing sensitive ships in the extension. The full flow is in Payments, safely. - Pro data. Anything inside the extension is public, so Pro data has to be gated on a
server. A Vercel function on the website (
/api/data) checks the key with Dodo, then returns the latest city data (about 150 KB, cached with an ETag so unchanged data costs nothing). The data is built by the existing GitHub Actions pipeline, moving from monthly to weekly, and stored in Vercel Blob. - Extension. The popup splits into tabs (Page, Check, Settings, Pro). The Pro tab sells
and manages Pro: plan status, devices, manage subscription, remove from this browser. Plus
the "why this score" panel on listing pages, and a daily refresh using the
alarmspermission. Network access to the website and Dodo would be an optional permission, requested only when someone enters a key, so free users see no new permission and no network traffic. Scores are still computed in the browser. - Webhooks. Not needed at first: a cancelled or refunded subscription makes
validatefail on its own. Dodo webhooks could later drive emails or usage stats.
Before building it
- Data rights. Inside Airbnb's data is CC BY 4.0, which allows commercial use with credit. The project itself is non-commercial, though, and its data policies ask people not to republish the data and to get in touch for uses outside its mission. Contact data@insideairbnb.com before charging anything. Their data subscription may also be the way to get fresher data than the public quarterly releases.
- Prices. Settled above. Before charging anyone, check Dodo's fees in the live dashboard (4% + $0.40 per sale, +1.5% outside the US, +0.5% on subscriptions, as published).
- Free plan details. Whether the free scale keeps the review-count weighting (step 1), which is cheap and makes free scores much better, or drops it.
- Trial. None: the free plan is already a permanent trial.
- Policies. Update the privacy policy (license key, data download), add terms of sale and a refund policy to the website, and declare paid features in each store listing.
Milestones
- Pro data API on Vercel and weekly data builds.
- Extension: license entry, activation and validation, data download and cache, the "why this score" panel.
- Dodo products in test mode, checkout links and a pricing page on the website.
- Policies and store listing updates.
- Free plan switches to the flat scale; Pro launches.